


Retracing Old Steps

by StevetheIcecube



Category: Xenoblade Chronicles 2 (Video Game)
Genre: Amnesia, Character death tag is for canon deaths, Established Relationship, Fluff and Angst, M/M, New Game Plus, Optimism, Past Character Death, Post-Canon, Sort Of, Spoiers, Torna Tuesday
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-11
Updated: 2018-12-11
Packaged: 2019-09-15 21:22:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,914
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16940967
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StevetheIcecube/pseuds/StevetheIcecube
Summary: By all rights, the core crystals should have been impossible. A pair of core crystals for a pair of flesh eaters Mikhail had thought he would never see again. But new worlds meant new possibilities and this was an opportunity he couldn't pass up.





	Retracing Old Steps

**Author's Note:**

  * For [CorruptedHex](https://archiveofourown.org/users/CorruptedHex/gifts).



> So on Twitter Hex (tagged here) suggested a NG+ ending to XC2 in which...well, you'll see :)  
> This is also another Torna Tuesday piece, hoping that this'll catch on and we'll get more people on board!

Mikhail wasn’t going to lie - he froze when he saw it happen. When he heard that gasp of pain. When he...when he watched everything he’d fought alongside fall apart. It was too much for him to bear, but he had to keep moving. He’d committed, now, to the end. The end had come, and he’d chosen a side, and he needed to see this through.

Even if the feeling when he saw Akhos’ core crystal fall to the ground, dull, was like nothing he’d ever experienced before. It was barely held together; covered in holes, the normally smooth but dull stone scorched. He didn’t even know if it...if it was even...he tried not to think about it. Because it was awful. It was the worst thing he’d ever experienced.

For all his jokes, all the quips between the pair of them, it hadn’t been Patroka. It had been Akhos that he loved. Akhos that he hadn’t wanted to say goodbye to just in case they never spoke again. And they hadn’t, because Akhos hadn’t even seen him, the way he was rushing around looking out for Jin, looking out for Patroka. Because Mikhail had been hidden, out of sight. Because he hadn’t wanted to fight Jin.

The first thing he’d done when the dust had settled and he’d been able to move past (he’d never be able to move on) from seeing the one man he admired most disintegrate into light in front of him was scoop up the pair of battered core crystals left on the ground. Jin didn’t have any core crystal remains to pick up.

Honestly, looking at the condition of the core crystals, Mikhail wasn’t overly convinced that the pair would ever be awakened again. He didn’t know of flesh eaters ever returning to their cores, but he supposed that the failure to do that was what had happened to Jin (he was never going to see Jin again he’d never hear his soft, firm voice telling him to calm down or see the flicker of a smile or-).

But there was hope. And Mikhail cradled those crystals in his hands all the way up the longest elevator ride he’d ever experienced. And then he tucked them into his jacket pockets for safe keeping, though now they were this high up he didn’t see them surviving through what was clearly the final face off.

Honestly, this whole thing had been a huge waste of time and effort and...Mikhail was drained. Seeing Elysium, meeting the Architect...he really just wanted to scream. And curl up into a ball and cry until the world inevitably came to an end because no amount of optimism from Rex would save them now, would it? Because this was his hope. And it was practically a graveyard. The only survivor was the man who had consigned himself to their death.

When Rex asked him if he wanted to head down the Tree and help out the people down below with what was going on, help people get out of immediate danger, he jumped at the chance. He didn’t want to be in the World Tree when Malos lost or won. He didn’t want to face against the only person remaining in the world he’d had any kinship with for so many years.

He was glad he hadn’t stayed, considering what had happened next. No amount of hurled insults would have made up for Malos’ death. He wouldn’t have been able to continue, knowing he was responsible for Malos not completing Jin’s goal. He was content to have been down on Mor Ardain, comforting some child refugees, telling them they’d be okay. He was happy to have been defending the people at the port from the fearful monsters.

And when the cores started to glow mere hours after the titan made landfall on the new mass of earth they were meant to call home, Mikhail didn’t know what to do. It was...he couldn’t trust the cores to anyone. Because they would wake up confused and maybe they’d still be flesh eaters. Maybe they’d have a power their drivers couldn’t control. Maybe they would be unhappy, or hurt.

Something in the back of his head told him to give the cores to Rex and his friends. However briefly, he’d functioned as the blade of the Special Inquisitor of Mor Arain, and she wasn’t a bad driver. None of them were bad drivers.

But then there was the history. There was a history between Torna and that group that couldn’t be overcome by a spot of amnesia. Because as long as there was recognition on at least one side, that history was still there, and he couldn’t consign Akhos and Patroka to something like that.

Which left leaving them in their cores, or him as their driver. And he didn’t know what to do, because he couldn’t leave them. But he...he’d only been a driver once. And Cressidus had been totally different to - well, it wasn’t just Rex and his friends who had history with Torna. He had so much history with them and he would never be able to live up to that.

It took a couple of days of lonely but busy pondering to make up his mind, and in a way, it helped him make up his mind. This Alrest...it seemed like a place for new starts. Trying something new, even. People didn’t recognise him as a member of Torna on sight; the same would be true of Patroka and Akhos, he was sure.

It was a place for new starts, but he felt so cut off from the humans of this new world. People were calling it Elysium, among other things. He wasn’t a human, no matter how much he tried to pretend he was. He couldn’t connect with the young man who impulsively and with a lot of blushing invited him to get a coffee with him (Mikhail, the fool, had agreed, wanting to be able to move on more than he wanted to not let the young man down). He didn’t know these people, their world, and they could never understand his.

So he held shaking hands over core crystals that by every known science just shouldn’t exist. Crystals that were too damaged to possibly give of this light, hold still the essence they held before everything that had happened in Patroka and Akhos’ last lifetimes. He held the core crystals over his heart and closed his eyes.

Patroka first. Seeing Akhos first would hurt far too much. It would hurt beyond imagining. It still hurt like hell when he saw Patroka’s form appear in front of him in just the same way she’d been the whole time he knew her. Beautiful, deadly, and not giving a damn about who he was or why she was here. Classic Patroka. (It still hurt)

And then...Akhos second. Because even if a barrier of memory separated him now from the man he’d once held in his arms at night, smoothing back his hair whenever he smushed it into a manuscript he’d fallen asleep writing...nope nope nope. There was a barrier between them now, a history that Akhos of the now hadn’t shared with him, but Akhos and Patroka were a pair. They always had been, even if they didn’t like to admit it.

Seeing the two of them standing side by side again, confused, unsure...Mikhail realised he hadn’t even thought about what he was going to say to them. How to explain how they’d come to this place, how they’d come to be here with him with no memories and yet…

This was hard. It was hard to put everything into words, yet he’d always managed it before. He’d had so much to say to Akhos before, and now he had no words to express the things that had been. “I’m Mikhail,” he managed, trying to ignore their eyes on him. “And I think I have a lot of explaining to do.”

So he explained. He explained how he’d first met Akhos and Patroka, and what they’d told him about their lives before becoming flesh eaters. Patroka had predictably sniffed when he’d informed her that they’d seen each other as siblings, in a way. But otherwise they’d listened as Mikhail told them about Jin, and Malos, and Torna. And how their lives had been cut short yet they were still here in a way that Mikhail had never imagined would happen.

After that, he told them about this new world. Elysium, they called it, though it wasn’t exactly a paradise, and life was going to be hard for the foreseeable future as people were forced to leave what they knew behind. Something must have happened, he reasoned, with the Architect. Otherwise this never would have happened.

“That’s quite the tale,” Akhos said, when Mikhail finally stopped speaking. The familiar rise and fall of his tone was exactly the same. Exactly. But the words still held something different and that stabbed at Mikhail like nothing else could.

“I suppose it is,” he said.

“What does it matter, if we don’t remember?” Patroka asked. Mikhail supposed she was right. Bringing up the past placed something onto the pair that Mikhail would never experience.

“It matters to me,” Mikhail said, right as Akhos said the same thing. They looked at each other, and Akhos cracked a smile, but Mikhail couldn’t summon one. “It matters to me because you were both...my friends.” The truth was a pressure that Mikhail couldn’t put on Akhos. Not in a million years.

-

Being flesh eaters, Akhos and Patroka were free to head on their way. Mikhail hoped they knew this, because he wasn’t going to say it. He knew it was bad, to hide it from them like this, but neither of them had a reason to stay. He was as unfamiliar with the world as they were. They were all capable enough to go off in the world on their own.

If he said that they didn’t have to stay, they might have to think of a reason not to leave. And Mikhail wasn’t confident that those reasons even existed yet. Maybe he should still tell them, and let them make the decision, but...he didn’t know if he could take losing them a second time. This new world was so big, as far as he could tell, so if they split up, they might never see each other again. That was too much for him to deal with.

He’d take being called weak for that, honestly, because he didn’t feel strong. He felt...pretty afraid, honestly. He felt displaced from the things he’d known for years now. His purpose in life, the one thing he’d dedicated himself to, it was gone. And he had failed.

It weighed pretty heavily, knowing he wouldn’t get a second chance. And, along the way, he’d lost pretty much everything he cared about. Now, all he had was two of the four people he’d held dear, who no longer even remembered the time they’d shared together.

They were travelling together, across this new found land. They weren’t aiming anywhere in particular; they were just walking. Getting a sense of the earth beneath their feet and how endless everything was. Mikhail hoped they’d reach an end of it at some point. Because if they didn’t, they might just keep walking until the end of time.

There wasn’t very much that was interesting, not at first. A wide expanse of fields, followed by a hilly section. The ground was pretty dry, and nothing seemed to really live around here. They didn’t talk much; just continued to walk in silence, waiting for something to happen that was worth talking about.

Evenings were different - Akhos would sit next to Mikhail in the small amount of shelter they could find, and then he’d ask Mikhail to tell him something about Alrest. Mikhail got the sense that he was writing it all down, but none of them had any paper or writing supplies, so maybe he was just fielding ideas. Or maybe he was just listening.

That was when Mikhail felt closest to the past. It was different, sure, because it was him telling someone who no longer remembered what the world used to be like. There was a detachment from it, something missing, something gone wrong. But Akhos never seemed to mind. He just wanted to hear about it.

Mikhail felt the first spark of the past, the first thing close to what he’d had before, when they came to a huge river. There was no bridge; no one had ever been here before, after all, at least most likely they hadn’t. The three of them had seen literally no signs of any human life since they’d set out, after all.

It was a wide river, but neither deep nor fast flowing. It just moved steadily along, and before he knew it, Mikhail had been staring at it for a few minutes. The first thing he did when he stopped daydreaming was head over to the water’s edge. Blade eaters and flesh eaters didn’t need to eat or drink, not really, at least not much (it was a weird energy exchange thing that had something to do with ether and Mikhail had never really questioned it all that much), but it was nice to take a drink.

Two seconds later, he was flat on his face in the river, absolutely soaked, and Akhos was behind him, and Mikhail could hear both him and Patroka cackling with delight. He grinned, pulling himself up and letting the water stream from his hair as he chased the two blades to shove them into the water himself.

The sun was setting by the time they’d actually crossed the river, and all three of them were absolutely freezing, dripping water everywhere. But Mikhail felt...happy. They collapsed under a tree, breathless and laughing, and he felt himself for the first time in a long time.

“Up or down the river?” Patroka asked, while they were all lying side by side, looking up through the branches and at the stars in the sky above them.

“Up,” Mikhail said, after a moment of thought. “People would have spread along the coastline, and there might be a settlement further down. But going up the river will probably take us somewhere really interesting.”

“A mystical adventure,” Akhos said, that same wonder in his voice as always. It made Mikhail’s heart hurt a little, but less than it had. “I’m in.”

Silence fell for a few minutes. “Me too,” Patroka said. “Sounds like not a complete bore, anyway.” A glowing recommendation of his actions by Patroka, then. It made Mikhail smile.

-

They followed the river upstream to a mountain, and then they climbed the mountain. It was there that...Mikhail realised there was no getting over this. His feelings. Even if he was forging something new with Akhos and Patroka, he really never would leave the past behind him.

He’d kind of been hoping that he’d be able to. He hadn’t been sure, of course, but he’d been willing to try. But they’d been together for weeks now, and, well, the feelings weren’t going away. When he met Akhos’ eyes, his heart jumped in anticipation of words that wouldn’t come. When they had conversations, Mikhail just wanted to revert back to the way they used to speak to each other. But they couldn’t.

It was too real, too fresh. He’d lost the person he loved most. And then the person he loved most was still right there and it was awful. Wonderful at the same time, of course, because Akhos still was a wonderful person to be around. Endlessly lively, full of smart quips.

They were still climbing the mountain when the rain started coming down in sheets. It did, sometimes. The weather in Elysium seemed to have two settings: on and off. It was raining or it was sunny. The rain was so cold, so hard, that they had to take shelter in a cave barely large enough to let the three of them sit hunched up inside.

“I vote for heading down again when this stops,” Patroka said, craning her neck to glance outside. Mikhail didn’t know why she bothered, seeing as they could still clearly hear the rain coming down.

“We should keep going!” Akhos protested. “We’ll be the first people to climb this mountain. Life is a great adventure and we shouldn’t let the troughs of our journey turn us away from the peaks.”

“It doesn’t really matter,” Patroka said. “Who’ll know that we were the first? Who’ll even care?”

“I will,” Akhos said. “You could leave if you wanted to. I want you to stay, of course, sister, but-”

“You don’t need to try so hard to buy into that past we supposedly had together,” Patroka snapped. “What’s your obsession with it, anyway? It’s gone now. The same way that we’ll be gone from that peak the moment we leave it, not even leaving a trace.”

“The past isn’t gone forever,” Akhos said firmly. “I still feel it, somewhere in my core.” He frowned, his hand drifting over where his core crystal lay. “Something stirs within me when I look at Mikhail, and I think it’s recognition.”

Patroka mumbled something and looked away, a small smile of some kind on her face. Akhos looked up at Mikhail, a look of slight despair on his face. Well, she hadn’t left, and that was something. They were still a group, and when it came to the end of the rain, they’d continue heading up the mountain.

The rain continued for long enough that Mikhail fell asleep, even cramped in the cave like he was. And when he awoke...he cursed not having enough space in the cave, because he couldn’t move without waking Akhos, who was...curled up in his arms. Damn it. He couldn’t even enjoy this because of how embarrassing it was.

Slowly, he tried to make his way away from Akhos, trying not to wake him up. Except his arms were wrapped around the slightly smaller man, meaning that if he moved too much, Akhos would definitely wake up. But if he moved slowly, he risked Akhos actually knowing the way they’d been sleeping if he did wake up.

As he turned his head, he saw...damn it damn it, this really wasn’t his day. Patroka was looking at him, a huge, all-knowing grin on her face. Argh, this was not going his way at all. He wouldn’t be able to get away from the embarrassment caused by this, not in the next couple of decades. The first time Patroka had caught them doing anything romantic...she hadn’t let it go for months. And this was so much worse.

“Just move quietly and quickly, he’ll go straight back to sleep,” Patroka whispered. Mikhail nodded, hoping she was right. He was hopeless in a situation like this. He did as she said, and Akhos shifted, mumbled, and rolled over, but remained decidedly asleep. Mikhail breathed a sigh of relief. “And now we’re going outside.”

Eyeing her warily, Mikhail just nodded, following her out of the cave. “Still planning on coming up to the peak?” He asked, stretching out his limbs after so many hours of being way, way too cramped. Ouch. He wasn’t two hundred years old anymore, for sure.

Patroka nodded. “Not like there’s anything else to do,” she said with a shrug. “You two were boning before we died, weren’t you?”

Mikhail spluttered. That was...not a question he’d ever really expected to hear in his life, if he was being honest. And it wasn’t something he really wanted to answer, either. “Well, out with it,” Patroka said. “He’ll be awake eventually.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, we were a thing before.”

“You can still be a thing now,” she said. “Unless you didn’t want to? Why did you lie to us about it?”

“I didn’t lie,” he said quickly. “I just didn’t give you all of the facts. We were friends. A family, even.”

“Do you think that helps anyone?” she asked, rolling her eyes.

Mikhail shrugged. “Probably not,” he admitted. “Me, maybe. I didn’t want to push too hard when everything was still uncertain.”

“Just go for it,” Patroka said. “You two are close. I’m sure there won’t be a problem. Better to know than not. Also, I can’t stand the tension and the moping and heart eyes. It makes me sick.”

Mikhail nodded, though he wasn’t entirely sure if he agreed with her. Patroka wasn’t known for being level-headed, but then again, that had been Jin’s thing, and Jin was…

“I said stop,” Patroka said, looking at him very pointedly. “You have a face, you know. When you’re getting sad about the past and all that. Try having a bit of a personality and you’ll be way more attractive to Akhos.”

“I didn’t ask for relationship advice,” he protested.

“Tough,” Patroka replied. “You’ve got it now.” Mikhail opened his mouth to argue again, and then sighed. She may not be right, exactly, but she had a bit of a point. He needed to stop living in the past and start heading towards the future. That was meant to be what the whole mountain climbing thing was about.

True to form, Akhos surfaced a few minutes later, not seeming like he knew anything about what had occurred overnight or that he’d heard what had been said outside. And with that, they continued up the mountain. They were near the top, and the steepness of it all combined with the rain from the night before made it tough going, but they made steady progress.

The sun was starting to set as they finally reached a point where they could climb no further. At the top, there was a lot of wind, and there was only space for the three of them to sit very close together at the edge, looking out over the world, but it was...magical.

The land stretched out so far ahead of them. There was so much to see. Mikhail could see the plains area they’d crossed, but further away there was a forest which stretched on into the horizon. There was so much life further out, and no one else had seen it before. No one else had spoiled it.

Without thinking, Mikhail turned his head, leaned over, and kissed Akhos. He didn’t know why he did it, it had just seemed- right, somehow. Akhos made a surprised sound; Patroka made one of faint disgust. But when Mikhail pulled away, Akhos didn’t look annoyed or concerned. He was smiling. It was the wrong time for words, but...Akhos’ hand took hold of Mikhail’s.

They sat in silence, the three of them. The whole world in front of them, the sun setting, it was stunning and hopeful and...it stirred something inside of Mikhail he hadn’t felt for true long. Real happiness, untinged by regret. A future he could look forward to, and people he could experience it with.

Their past was full of sadness, full of broken things. Full of things they would never get back, people who would never return, memories and people and places lost forever. But the present and the future were looking pretty okay, honestly. Mikhail would even say that the future was looking great.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading :) please leave a comment if you have any thoughts! I worked pretty hard on this one.


End file.
